A day after Mayor Eric Adams said he would oppose an effort to reduce homelessness by increasing the number of housing vouchers, his top housing official said she would step down.
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Eric Adams should resign
New York City’s Housing Chief Is Resigning Amid a Homelessness Crisis
A day after Mayor Eric Adams said he would oppose an effort to reduce homelessness by increasing the number of housing vouchers, his top housing official said she would step down.
The mayor has said the city is struggling to deal with a homelessness crisis. Now, Jessica Katz, left, who worked as one of his top officials on housing, is resigning.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
By
Mihir Zaveri and
Jeffery C. Mays
May 24, 2023 Updated 12:53 p.m. ET
The architect of Mayor Eric Adams’s housing plan is resigning, the mayor’s office confirmed on Wednesday, a key departure that underscores the administration’s struggles in dealing with the city’s intensifying affordability and homelessness crisis.
The official, Jessica Katz, Mr. Adams’s chief housing officer, is leaving as the mayor struggles to
respond to a housing crisis in the city and as the homeless shelter population reaches record levels.
Mr. Adams has faced criticism for focusing too narrowly on providing emergency housing, rather than addressing structural issues in order to free up shelter space for both the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have come to the city over the last year and for city residents experiencing homelessness.
But there has been confusion within the administration about who was in charge of dealing with the city’s mounting housing problems, one of the reasons Ms. Katz is stepping down, according to a person familiar with her thinking.
Another factor in Ms. Katz’s decision, another person familiar with her thinking said, was the mayor’s decision on Tuesday to
oppose legislation that would increase the number of people who can access housing vouchers, a push by the City Council to reduce the homeless population and help people facing eviction.
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The Council is set to vote on a set of bills that would, among other things, remove a requirement that people stay in homeless shelters for 90 days before they’re eligible for city funded housing vouchers. The mayor could eliminate the 90-day shelter rule on his own but has declined to do so.
The council members who are sponsoring the legislation believe it would help free up room in the shelter system and get people more quickly to stable, permanent housing. The mayor has argued it would cost the city billions of dollars at a moment when it is facing financial difficulties.
Ms. Katz’s impending departure was first
reported by the news site Gothamist. It was not immediately clear when her last day on the job would be.
Mr. Adams praised Ms. Katz in a statement on Wednesday.
“Jessica worked every day to ensure that New Yorkers were at the center of our housing policies, whether an individual experiencing homelessness, a family living in NYCHA, or a lifelong New Yorker struggling to stay in the neighborhood they love,” the mayor said.
Questions about how much authority the mayor was actually giving Ms. Katz have swirled since her appointment in January 2022. Housing advocates noted that Ms. Katz did not receive a “deputy mayor” title, unlike her counterparts in previous administrations. Decisions about major housing issues, such as redeveloping neighborhoods, seemed to flow through other city officials.
Vacancies in the housing department and other city agencies
slowed the city’s ability to subsidize new affordable housing, meaning the city’s housing problems could worsen. The administration also
failed to sway legislators in Albany to pass bills that could have allowed for more construction in the city and its suburbs.
Ms. Katz had focused on addressing the
deteriorating conditions in public housing and the
dysfunction and bureaucracy many people encounter when trying to avoid homelessness. In recent months, she had also focused on finding places for migrants to stay.
The announcement of her resignation came the day after the mayor began a push to
eliminate the city’s right-to-shelter guarantee, which requires the city to offer shelter to anyone who asks for it. More than 78,000 people were in the city’s main shelter system as of early May, and the Adams administration has said it is overwhelmed.
Before joining the administration, Ms. Katz was the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, a nonprofit research group. She also worked in the administrations of Mr. Adams’s most immediate predecessors, Mayors Bill de Blasio and Michael R. Bloomberg.
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gothamist.com
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